Conjunction of Mercury and Pluto

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Mercury and 134340 Pluto will share the same right ascension, with Mercury passing 1°35' to the north of 134340 Pluto.

From Cambridge however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be 3° below the horizon at dawn.

Mercury will be at mag -0.2, and 134340 Pluto at mag 15.1, both in the constellation Sagittarius.

The pair will be too widely separated to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will be visible through a pair of binoculars.

A graph of the angular separation between Mercury and 134340 Pluto around the time of closest approach is available here.

The positions of the two objects at the moment of conjunction will be as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
Mercury 20h05m10s 21°05'S Sagittarius -0.2 5"7
134340 Pluto 20h05m10s 22°41'S Sagittarius 15.1 0"0

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 22° from the Sun, which is in Capricornus at this time of year.

The sky on 10 Feb 2023

The sky on 10 February 2023
Sunrise
06:46
Sunset
17:09
Twilight ends
18:44
Twilight begins
05:10


Waning Gibbous

72%

20 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:45 10:26 15:07
Venus 07:58 13:39 19:20
Moon 21:08 03:09 09:00
Mars 11:19 19:03 02:47
Jupiter 08:41 14:51 21:02
Saturn 07:08 12:19 17:31
All times shown in EST.

Source

The circumstances of this event were computed using the DE430 planetary ephemeris published by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).

This event was automatically generated by searching the ephemeris for planetary alignments which are of interest to amateur astronomers, and the text above was generated based on an estimate of your location.

Related news

19 Jul 2022  –  134340 Pluto at opposition
21 Jul 2023  –  134340 Pluto at opposition
23 Jul 2024  –  134340 Pluto at opposition
25 Jul 2025  –  134340 Pluto at opposition

Image credit

The Moon in conjunction with Venus and Jupiter, with the Very Large Telescope in the foreground. Image © Y. Beletsky, ESO, 2009.

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